Winning with AI: Prompting a skill to thrill

By Parminder Singh

There was a time when ‘skills’ meant the bottom section of a CV where we proudly listed leadership, marketing, PowerPoint, and, if we were feeling particularly ambitious, ‘strategic thinking’. Half of these were unverifiable. AI platforms have secretly borrowed the term and turned it into something far more demonstrable. A ‘skill’ is no longer just something you claim you can do. It is something you can teach your AI to do for you, repeatedly, in your preferred way.

This is a big shift. Most people still use AI like a smart stranger. Every time they open ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini, they re-explain the task from scratch: “I am a sales leader…” “Please write in a crisp tone…” “Here is how I like my summaries…”


That is like hiring an assistant each morning and introducing yourself all over again. Skills solve this problem.

Think of them as reusable mini-playbooks: You can create one for writing meeting summaries in your company’s format. Another for turning messy bullet points into a board memo. One for reviewing contracts. One for preparing interview questions.

Best skills are not generic: ‘Write better emails’ is weak. ‘Turn long, emotional email drafts into short, calm, executive responses’ is useful. ‘Summarise documents’ is ordinary. ‘Summarise this into risks, decisions & next steps’ is powerful.

Creating a skill: Start with one task. Write down the exact outcome you want. Add the audience, format, tone. Add the checks the AI must run before giving the answer. Then save it as a reusable instruction, custom assistant, GPT, Gemini project.

Stop treating AI as a magic box: Start treating it as a junior colleague who can be trained. Your future advantage may come from building a private skills library that reflects how you think, write, decide and work.

Parminder Singh is the CEO of Reliance Enterprise Intelligence (REIL) and cofounder of two AI ventures—ClayboxAI and WeKamp. For feedback, please email to eteyeonai@timesofindia.com.